In response to reviews: Guest (who commented on the first chapter) - If you had read the foreword I posted, you would already know that I have regarded Link as a girl since the NES days. Furthermore, this is not the first fanfiction about the topic that I have written (for example, I also have a fifty-thousand word fic specifically about this titled spring green written prior to the release of Breath of the Wild, which I simply haven't posted because I don't think it would go over well). But thank you for leaving your vitriol in the comments! Every negative comment that fails to read my notes only makes me more inclined to write and post, you know.
Freefan1412 - Very astute of you! It was indeed about two months ago that Link awoke. Link's awakening (no pun intended) and the Divine Beasts' awakening strangely happened to coincide.
You'll see how Link ends up involved here and I clarify her mental role further in the author's notes at the end of the chapter. She's certainly not seeing herself as the Hero with a Capital H, but her guilt on "stealing" the hero away prompts her into action.
The shrines carry different meanings in different places. The gorons are less outwardly religious inclined. Goro-goro is all about the holy act of creation, of making something new, whether that's something physical or more of a performance. For the gorons, taking a statue or carving that someone else made, breaking it up, and making something new of the same stone is "better" than preserving something just because. As a result, gorons are less worried about older monuments and instead more concerned with religion "in the here and now," if that makes sense. While the shrines are notable for being really old things that no one understands (you saw the team investigating why in the world the Darunia shrine suddenly turned blue in the previous chapter), they're not viewed as religious items or sanctuaries here. Yunobo knows about the slate due to his own research into Daruk from his hero worship; he's trying his best to become like his hero, and we'll learn some more about why he took Daruk as his personal hero many chapters down the line, once Link is a little more emotionally equipped to ask people questions.
As for what Link was thinking, the description of the Champions' slate seemed to match the sheikah slate. And even though Link doesn't want the responsibility, she also has a sense of justice strong enough that she can't just walk away when she has the very tool the gorons need to do something about Vah Rudania. But note that she doesn't suggest they go back to the city for help. She's not ready to be recognised as a hero, or even to call herself that. She's just "the courier of the slate" for now. Thanks for reading and being so interested!
Chapter Fourteen: Roasted Bird Thigh
As Yunobo leads Link through an alternate exit from the northern mine that takes them atop the pillar; as Yunobo explains the route to the Divine Beast Vah Rudania that the two youths will strive to board; as Yunobo elaborates on his plan to calm the Divine Beast himself, Link's movements take on a certain slipperiness like the uncertainty of a fever dream.
Lord Daru-daruk.
The carving on the golden gates.
Her own speech like an old woman's.
Impa's words about her looking just the same.
The gleaming Darunia drifting in her memories and the destroyed Darunia seared into her retinas.
The suspicions sink her stomach further down. She says little as Yunobo gestures for her to climb into a larger, flatter mine cart on a straight shot towards the side of Death Mountain. He clambers in behind her. Link can sense the jerkiness of his movements and how his entire frame trembles. She does not know what to do with her hands. She could say something; she could embrace him; she stays silent and still.
He sets the mine cart in motion by fiddling with something on the back. The cart hurtles forward at a reasonable pace. Link dizzies. The lava below swirls into a single pool of sweltering brightness, and the spiced ironshroom weighs her down as though she had swallowed a block of lead.
The cart arrives safely on the survey post on the ring of pillars just outside of Death Mountain. A tiny rock affair that has escaped destruction for being unassumingly perched on what Yunobo calls Lake Darman. From here, Death Mountain looms so close that it swallows up the entirety of the world. The largest mountain in Hyrule, a volcano that pumps the blood of the heart of the earth, surrounded by stone claws like the many-fingered hand of the Goddess Din protectively grasping the world fires in her palm.
The view takes her breath away.
In the meanwhile, Yunobo wrings his hands. The usual track he would take has broken from barrages, "so w-we'll have to g-go across the B-b-bridge of Eldin," he notes and leads her on another set of rails cascading downwards to the large mass of land that makes up the majority of Eldin. She can just barely make out the blue of the shrine she activated at the upper levels of Darunia. And there, across the gorge of impenetrable lava so hot that not even gorons can survive indefinitely, affixed to a cliffside of Death Mountain itself, rises a massive stone and metal pillar into the heavens themselves. Despite Death Mountain dwarfing the Bridge of Eldin in width, the Bridge of Eldin spans as long as the peak juts high. Between where they stand and the side of the mountain, the valley of flooded lava stretches on for eternity.
"That's the b-bridge. The Elders r-raised it so Vah Ruda-rud-dania c-couldn't cross into the city...but we'll n-need to set it r-right, right? You kn-know how much that means, to t-t-take something built by your own p-people's hands and h-have to take it ap-part to prot-tect them." He frowns. His body, nearly twice her height, shivers. "Do y-y-you really th-think that th-this is a g-good idea, Link?" His voice threatens to break. "Can—c-can we—c-c-can we r-really d-do it ourselves?"
She is no hero. No matter what memories she might regain—no, those memories do not belong to her, but to her body—no matter what memories her body might regain of its previous occupant, she is no hero. Link returns his glance with her own concern.
Her features smooth into blankness.
Somehow, instead of being put by the vacancy in her eyes, Yunobo nods. "Y-yeah. Y-you're right." Link stares at him. "W-we got this." His voice strengthens as he wraps the shawl around his fist. "You've got the Champions' slate and I've got Lord Daru-daruk's protection."
Link raises her hands. The words do not form immediately but she forces them from her fingers. "He's alive?"
"Huh?" Yunobo ogles her. "L-lord Daru-daruk? H-h-he...he...h-ee's been with the G-goddesses for years now. I w-wish I c-could've known him."
"How long?" she asks, no longer looking at him but keeping her gaze on the line of the horizon. The bridge on the other side of the gorge blurs at the edges.
"Huh? How l-long...?" Yunobo scratches his jaw. "Um, s-since the G-great Calamity. Decades ago." He counts on his fingers. "A hund-dred y-years or so, right?"
Link dips her head very slowly. "What was the Great Calamity?" She flattens her hands in the insides of her pockets.
Yunobo scratches his jaw more furiously. "You d-don't know? Huh? Oh, is it a l-l-language thing? I don't know h-how to say it in Central H-hyrulean, but you know wh-what happened a century ago." She shakes her head and Yunobo scratches his jaw so fervently that Link wonders if his fingers won't carve a furrow in his rocky skin. "H-h-h-huh? Do hyl-lians not care about it anymore? I g-guess that it happened a l-long time ago." The fingers of his free hand twitched around the shawl. "I th-think my g-great...great?...grandpa was a little k-kid then, so it's not l-like I know what things w-were like before that...b-but that's when H-hyrule fell, and Lord Daru-daruk passed on to the Goddesses" Yunobo offers her a small smile. "I heard that the C-calamitious One w-wasn't really stopped, just sealed aw-way like it'd b-b-been before. But w-with any luck it'll be another t-ten thousand years, right?"
Link nods and says nothing else. If she moves even a single step, the ground will fall out beneath her.
"I know I'm n-not Lord Daru-daruk's descendant by blood, b-but..." Yunobo grips the corners of the shawl. "...I feel like w-we were hewn of the s-same rock. Have you ever f-felt like that? I guess it's kind of silly t-to feel like you c-could be a hero from legend, but—" He curls his right hand into a fist, a corner of the blue shawl caught between his thumb and forefinger, and then looks at his own hand as if he'd never seen it before. "—I think we can do it. Let's go, Link."
Without a word Link follows behind him. He directs her attention to a giant metal cannon that once stood as one of three, its brethren having since been reduced to scrap. Link watches Yunobo aim the cannon, curve himself into a ball, and spontaneously drop into the chase of the cannon.
She rubs her eyes.
After a few moments Yunobo pokes his head out to call for Link. "F-fire the cannon. I'll be fine; I p-promise! This is the only way to l-l-lower the B-bridge of Eldin, right?" He ducks back down, then pokes his head out again. "Unless you d-don't have anything to f-fire it with...? I d-don't know much about h-hylians."
The slate—the sheikah slate, or maybe the Champions' slate—provides a circular bomb that fits into the cannon's explosive chamber. Closing the cover, she seals it with a turn of the knob and detonates the bomb.
With a boom loud enough for her to automatically cover her ears, Yunobo shoots from the cannon's muzzle to crash into the rock struts at the base of the Bridge of Eldin. The impact sends him recoiling back the same direction. Link throws herself to the ground to avoid the bouncing ball of rock that rolls to a stop some five metres behind her. The Bridge of Eldin groans. She raises her head to stare at the bridge.
For the longest moment the bridge remains upright, visibly swaying back and forth, before gravity beckons it down. She watches it fall. Slowly at first, its inertia keeping it aloft, and then more and more quickly.
Just before impact Link spreads herself out flat on the earth and braces her body.
The ground itself seems to wave, bend, break as metal contacts stone. Its weight splinters the cliff. Link feels herself lift from the rock into the air a full centimetre by the sheer force of the bridge smashing across the gorge.
When she can breathe again, she checks her belongings, checks the pouch of fireproof elixirs. A single vial has broken, which she drinks down to ward off the liquid sloshing away when she least expects.
Her legs wobble up into a position approximating standing. The wind across the Bridge of Eldin brushes the sidelocks from her face, and she looks outwards and upwards towards Death Mountain, over the truly massive bridge that has fallen and yet not broken, a beast of steel and stone, wrought of the finest metalworkers that Eldin has to offer, which has withstood the test of time and the barrage of a Divine Beast.
"L-link?"
She turns her head, then her entire body towards Yunobo, who grips the hem of the blue shawl. The breeze ripples the fabric behind him and it spreads slightly out like half of a cape. With the shawl unfurled, Link can see the sewn together tears, the patches of a slightly different colour of blue, the age of the shawl.
"Are you r-ready? W-we should h-hurry. They'll c-come to investigate why the b-bridge came down." Yunobo taps his index fingers against one another. "A-and if we don't calm down Vah Ruda-rudania soon, th-they'll have to r-raise it again. Th-the bridge, I m-mean. N-not Vah Ruda-rud-dania."
The unspoken hangs in the air. Link nods decisively.
They walk the bridge. With its sheer length, the journey takes them no small amount of time. By the time they reach the other end, Yunobo requests a brief respite, and they take shelter under a rock arch.
While Yunobo rests, Link stretches and practises with the spear and the boomerang. She knows how to use a sword, yet the lizalfos from which she has filched spears mostly prefer their own particular weapons. The usual tricks she can pull with a blade do not necessarily translate to a spear, which has its own advantages. Link finds the unanticipated centre of gravity a detriment to the flips and jumps on which her body relies to keep herself mobile.
She should have taken up Misan's advice on commissioning chainmail.
Fighting lizalfos one on one or knocking keese from the sky with arrows comes a far cry from whatever may lurk in the Divine Beast. Then again what could she possibly accomplish with a simple metal spear and a forked boomerang against a being of that magnitude, where a single toe of the Divine Beast spans two or three times her size?
She does not play hero, merely escort. If not for the slate in her pouch necessary for Yunobo to enter the Divine Beast, she would wait with Glepp and Misan. Yet the author of the letter on the Great Plateau urged her to keep the slate with her, and so she will follow Yunobo to the ends of the earth if it would mean helping the people of Eldin. She will unlock the gate for Yunobo, and then Yunobo will become the hero that he wishes to be.
She has no such wish but to retire to a comfortable existence where she can prepare delicious meals for herself every evening, and perhaps to find those faces she has seen in her memories.
Her memories.
Her stomach tightens. She narrows her world to adjusting her stance, to learning to control the shift of her weight in line with the spear.
Yunobo begins to tell her what he knows of Death Mountain. With any luck the Divine Beast will not commence another attack during their mission, as it has only moved every few days. Men sent to the Divine Beast, he says quietly, folding and unfolding the shawl repeatedly in his hands, have reported strange mechanical flying beings that the Divine Beast can release from its form that can blaze through even the thickest of armour with sufficient heat. The Divine Beast spends most of its time inside of the actual caldera of Death Mountain, where the overwhelming heat dispels even the approach of gorons, much less a hylian with fireproof elixirs, yet the Divine Beast crawls up onto the exterior of Death Mountain several hours prior to making its move.
"S-so...if we can c-c-catch it during that c-crawl, we can h-h-hit it where it h-hurts, and have some time to f-figure out a way to shut it off." He scratches his jaw. "Do y-you think we can do it?"
Link simply meets her gaze again, her expression blank as she struggles to fish for something to say.
Yunobo beams. "I-if you say so." She has said nothing. "All r-right! We sh-should probably go, right?"
Link starts to tilt her head in confusion, then simply stands up without further ado. Yunobo verbally traces the map, of travelling counterclockwise around the caldera to the further half of the volcano in order to wait. Along the route they will have to cross lava falls, but plenty of bridges and supports should exist. "Assuming th-that Vah Ruda-rudania hasn't b-broken them all."
They start the trek. This close to the hottest temperatures in all of Hyrule save for the fierce blaze of a lightning bolt, she breaks out in a sweat, fireproof elixir or not. The prospect of liquid against her clothing—and its implications for the layer of fireproofing paste—makes her sweat further. She quickens her pace. The first lava fell does indeed sport a single intact strut arching over it. Link and Yunobo cross it cautiously; the strut holds.
They exchange glances, Yunobo smiling nervously, Link grinning broadly.
A whirr brings Link to a halt. Yunobo walks into her back and bumps her forward. "Oh! S-sor—"
She hushes him with a finger over her lips. Dropping her belongings at Yunobo's feet, she climbs the stone cliff to their left up to try to catch the noise of the whirring. There, over the bridge of the next lava fall, hovers a strange circular thing with a glowing blue eye. It casts a pool of sapphire light beneath it and patrols back and forth along the bridge.
Link notches an arrow, yet she cannot find a good angle to aim at the eye on the automaton's underside from her higher vantage point. She glances around. A half-fragmented rock with a diameter of a metre—perhaps one of the projectiles, or a piece of one of the projectiles, of the Divine Beast—close by. She checks magnesis.
The boulder has enough iron content to be magnetised.
She grins to herself. Lifting the rock with the slate, Link guides it over to the hovering bird-like automaton. She positions it ever so deliberately above the guardian, inhales, exhales, and slams the guardian into the ground.
The guardian shrieks loudly in response as she raises the rock and sends it crashing down yet again. The automaton breaks into mangled crushed bits and bobs. Link drops the rock on the bridge beside the guardian's corpse. She looks about: the automaton's cries for help have not summoned anything nearby, at least not yet.
She glides down to land beside Yunobo, who stares openly at her with an expression she does not know how to read. Admiration? No, that can't be. Who would admire a ghost of the shell that once held the hero, before she awoke? "J-just who...wh-who are y-you, Link?" he whispers in awe, and she gazes at the ground.
"...it doesn't matter," she signs. She does not check whether he has read her words but simply goes on ahead with a steady gait. The sentry guardians patrol each bridge, some in clusters. They do not appear to have much intelligence. The automata investigate noises, she notices, but do not see anything outside of the pools of light cast out from their undersides. When she strikes down one with another guardian hovering nearby, the second attacks her by spewing forth that odd blue fire she learned of in the Darunia shrine. She barely escapes with a well-aimed arrow directly into its eye, blinding the automaton, and a bomb thrown that she happens to detonate at the right second. Link collapses to her knees afterwards to catch her breath and drink another fireproof elixir, less for the protection and more for the moisture in her hyperventilation-parched throat.
Still panting, she gestures for Yunobo to follow her.
She tests the radius of each sentry she comes across to lure them away one by one with noise, then bash them to death with magnesis-lifted rocks or stasis-kicked boulders. Yunobo cowers in the face of monsters and automata alike. Instead of forcing him to accompany her into the eye of danger, she whistles for him whenever she clears the path.
They go slowly.
The higher they climb up Death Mountain, the more monsters swarm. She discovers to some alarum that she has fewer arrows than she thought left in her quiver, and so furnixes shift from a minor nuisance to a major threat. They breathe out fire so hot that it burns more blue than red, and she dispatches them with well-thrown bombs. Packs of lizalfos hunt her down. Heatoises nearly spin her off of the precipices of the volcano. Winders turn the very ground into a hazard. She unties the red telescope from her left hip and learns to scope them from afar. She picks them off with arrows from a distance whenever she can and retrieves the arrows from their heads, praying that none breaks.
Some of the bridges and struts over the lava falls have gone out. Link's paraglider cannot hold Yunobo's weight. In place of gliding over the gaps, they rely on the unbroken cannons scattered here and there, previously used for gorons travelling rapidly around Death Mountain prior to the descent of the Divine Beast; Yunobo's explanation cuts off abruptly when Link shoots him from the cannon and then races to meet him. The journey goes long into the day. The spear that she has carried breaks, but she simply picks up another from the very lizalfos in which the spear shattered.
She leaves her fights with scraps and scratches of her own. The first time a lizalfos talon tears apart the skin of her lower leg she screams for the agony of heat, of the fire that cauterises her very flesh.
But the scars she gains tell her own story in her skin.
At length, with the sun halfway down its descent into the night, her companion halts in front of a rock that Link recognises as a stone shack. "H-here it is." Yunobo exhales. He taps his index fingers against one another. "N-now, when the Divine B-b-b-beast comes down t-to attack, we can t-try to use that Ch-champions' slate and f-f-follow in Lord Daru-daruk's footsteps."
"Why do you sometimes double up words, like Daru-darunia or Vah Ruda-rudania?" Link asks as Yunobo begins to slide open the door.
"Huh? Oh. Oh, I g-guess a h-hylian wouldn't know...but it's respectful! Like how we call Our Goddess Goro-goro, so we can say Daru-darunia when we talk about our city as...as you know, our city." He speaks with an unusual confidence, his words firmer than before; Link nods. "If I became an important figure—and I w-won't, s-so don't think I'm putting on airs—p-p-p-people would call me…" His voice trails off again. "Sorry, i-it f-feels too arrog-gant to say."
"Yuno-yunobo?" Link completes.
Yunobo blushes fiercely, as if his cheeks were molten. Hiding his face from Link he opens the door.
A squawk from within has Link lifting up her spear forward through the doorway before she registers the noise. Something thumps; the resistance of the spear jolts up her arms. It takes her a moment to become aware of the Eldic ostrich impaled onto the tip of the spear.
The wounds sustained by the bird have already begun to smoulder and smoke, if not as swiftly as she had anticipated. Her eyes widen. She can hear in the back of her mind a voice dredged from a memory:
"Ah!" A blink of eyes, maybe green as spring, or maybe blue as the guardians' fire-light. A smile, a clap of the hands, a wriggle of carving her observations into a metal tablet. "The Eldic ostrich must eat the fireproof lizards and smotherwing butterflies that inhabit Death Mountain freely and thus gain some measure of protection from the fire-resistant secretions of their scales and wings. It's brilliant!"
Link stares at the red-feathered bird that writhes on the spear. Before Link takes the bird out of its misery, she removes one of her fireproof elixirs. She squeezes the spear between her thighs to free her hands. Grabbing the ostrich by the neck—it pecks at her fingers but she moves out of the way—she stuffs its beak into the neck of the bottle and forces the fireproof elixir down its gullet. Yunobo covers his face with his hands as she lights the torches on the inside of the stone shack. She observes her reflection in the walls inlaid with sapphire. Yet the gems do not give off cold, the essence of ice trapped within them spent.
When she defeathers and skins the bird, it does not burst into flames thanks to the fire-resistant secretions of the fireproof elixir coursing through its system at the moment of death. She opens the door to set the raw meat onto the hot ground; she crouches down and watches it cook.
As she turns the bird over and over, she imagines a song to time her wait. The music swells; the meat cooks to well-done: though she would prefer medium-rare, she takes no chances in the middle of a volcano where her source of heat comes from the very volcanic rock.
Link brings the roasted bird back inside. Now that she has a chance to look about the small stone shack, she can see it as a sentry post of sorts, with chairs, desks, files upon files of metal books and the utensils to write in them. She plunks herself down on the floor next to Yunobo, whose eyes have grown to mirror the dimensions of her fist.
She blinks at him as she half-cuts, half-tears one of the bird's thighs. Her teeth crunch into the crispy outside skin that gives way to the layer of fat on the underside, deliciously chewy, and then into the meat of the dish. She digs in to delight in the textures of sinews and tendons, of the disparities between the more corded muscle and the more tender, sweeter meat. She bites the softened ends of the bones where they connect to the rubbery-in-texture-yet-delectable joints. Licking her lips for the taste of ostrich, she cracks open the bones and carves out the marrow with her knife. She sucks the flavour from the bones where they grow too hard to cut apart. Finished with one leg, she feasts upon the next.
Yunobo shakes his head. "I don't know h-how you eat living c-c-c-creatures like that. I'll s-stick with my rocks, I th-think. B-but that's n-n-not an insult!"
Link laughs. She wipes her mouth before continuing to chow down. While she eats, she notes Yunobo stand to gaze out the window at the western end of the survey shack.
"...Vah Ruda-rudania w-will come down soon. I j-just feel it in m-my gut. Y-you know what I m-mean, right?" She asks her gut: her gut wants more roasted ostrich, and Link obliges. "I don't know when exactly, b-but it's been c-coming down more f-f-frequently over the past t-two m-months, so it'll have to c-come down at some point, right? Once every f-f-few days so far, so it'll be tomorrow o-or the day after, right?"
Link shrugs. They agree to take turns on watch. When the Divine Beast comes down, she and Yunobo will face it.
For now, for this moment, cross-legged on the stone floor, a warm meal in her lap, a roof over her head, and the starry night above, she's alive, and nothing else matters; she's alive; she's alive.
In the distance, the mountain rumbles.
—
Roasted Bird Thigh (two and a quarter hearts) - raw bird thigh
Chapter Fourteen. First written: 14 June 2017. Last edited: 08 September 2017.
Author's notes: Link isn't going to be able to deny herself for long. She's kind of putting it off for now, but oh baby, once life calms down a tad and she gets the chance to reflect on this.
At the moment, Link sees herself as a courier of the slate. Yunobo needs the slate to activate Vah Rudania, and she can't give him the slate, so she'll walk over, use the slate to activate Vah Rudania, and then let Yunobo in. She's not seeing herself as the hero, just the person who happened to pick up the slate.
Note that Link doesn't exactly find out about the Great Calamity here, and also note that people don't actually know exactly what happened to Calamity Ganon. Yunobo mentions that with luck Calamity Ganon will be sealed another ten thousand years. Hmm!
If it's not clear, the girl in the memory is Zelda herself.
The little thing about Link hearing the music as she cooks until the meat becomes well-done is a reference to cooking in Monster Hunter.
You can indeed cook just by dropping food down in Eldin! I recommend the roasted mighty bananas; you cannot cook everything however, i.e. you can't cook silent princess. Another thank-you to my beloved beta reader, and another thank-you to you, the reader, for having journeyed with me so far.
midna's ass. 08 September 2017.
Beta reader's comments: This series is really great at ending chapters, but this is actually probably one of my low-key favourite chapter endings.
Emma. 08 September 2017.